Blanche La Guma at 76 sparkles with the energy and opinions of someone half her age. In her simple flat in Claremont, Cape Town, she is surrounded by memories of her life with Alex La Guma, of whom JM Coetzee wrote, “He was, one might plausibly argue, the most substantial writer the Western Cape had produced.” Through My Eyes reveals the relationship between Blanche and Alex La Guma in a life that has been dedicated to ideals which she still holds deeply.
Blanche La Guma is both an internationalist by experience and conviction and a quintessentially Cape Town person. In this documentary, she speaks openly of the difficulties of raising a family, being at the call of the movement and trying to realize her own ambitions. Blanche is important because she is part of a small group of coloured women in Cape Town in the 1950s who not only felt a oppressed by the imposition of apartheid, but felt a strong identification with the oppression of other Africans and gravitated towards the Communist Party. Blanche reveals that as a child she was selling Party literature and joined the Party before she ever met Alex La Guma. A trained nurse and midwife, Blanche was active in the Congress Movement, organising nurses against the enforced segregation of their profession. Without her steadfastness, commitment and love, the literary work of Alex, as well as their joint contribution to the struggle against apartheid, could not have been made in the wholehearted, devoted way in which it was.
In her directorial debut Lucilla Blankenberg takes us away from the male struggle hero biopic genre, providing a sympathetic Cape Town feminist counterpoint to the representation of women in the struggle against apartheid. Together, Blanche and Lucilla visit places that were important in Blanche’s personal, professional and political life. Blanche and Alex were very much a political couple. Through My Eyes provides a rare opportunity to look at two important political lives through the eyes of the woman who made it possible.
The documentary includes interviews with Blanche’s friends and comrades from the 50s and 60s including Terry Bell, Amy Thornton, Reg September and Sarah Carneson, as well interviews with her sons Barto and Eugene La Guma. Songs are by Tina Schouw.
Produced and Directed by Lucilla Blankenberg
Co-producer : Jack Lewis
Edited by Laddie Bosch